The Regional Management Board
The South East Fire & Rescue Authorities’ Regional Management Board was established in 2004 by the nine Fire & Rescue Authorities (FRAs) in the South-East; Buckinghamshire, East Sussex, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Kent, Oxfordshire, Royal Berkshire, Surrey & West Sussex. Its membership comprises the Chairman of each of these authorities. The Chair of the Board is appointed annually and is currently Councillor David Rowlands (Buckingham and Milton Keynes). The Vice-Chairman is Councillor Bryan Cope (Kent & Medway). Clerking services are provided by East Sussex.
The work of the Board.
The Board meets quarterly, and announcements of forthcoming meetings are made on this site. We have provided an archive of all previous meetings, and minutes, which is available from the resources section. The work of the Board is divided into 10 work areas. These are:
- Community Safety
- Response & Resilience
- Improvement
- Human Resources
- Training
- Equality & Diversity
- Environment
- Media and Communications
- Procurement
- Regional Control and FireLink
We have added environment and equality & diversity to this plan as separate work areas. Equality & diversity remains a significant challenge for fire & rescue authorities, and by creating a separate work area, linked to and supported by the existing human resources & training group, gives a focus to activities. Equality & diversity will become a standing item on all Board agendas from July 2008.
Collaboratively improving our approach to safeguarding the environment is an area where we feel significant progress can be made over the course of the plan. Funding has been allocated to improving environmental performance of all FRAs from the capacity building fund.
The resilience work area has been renamed response & resilience to more accurately reflect the work of this group. No changes have been made this year to the lead authority of work areas.
The Board's plans 2008/11
The programme has been established to cover the key areas identified by the National Framework 2008/11 and the national Equality & Diversity Strategy for Fire & Rescue Services 2008/18. The Board's business plan is available in the resources section of the website. We have conducted an equality impact assessment of the business plan which is available in the resources section. The previous business plan is also available.
The Board's aims and priorities
The government expects Regional Management Board’s to have clear aims and priorities, and for the projects it wishes to progress to be costed effectively. The increased expectation on RMBs to deliver is explicit in the National Framework. In response to this, the Board has agreed the following aim for the region:
'Through working together more closely in the region, deliver effective and efficient fire & rescue services to the public we serve, and to support each other to ensure all FRAs improve their performance.'
To support this aim, the following five priorities have been identified:
- To actively promote the successes of the Board to key stakeholders and to actively lobby key stakeholders to improve national fire & rescue policies and processes.
- To work together either as a whole or in sub-regional clusters as appropriate, and support each other through peer review.
- To improve the region’s performance against the equality standard for local government.
- To continue to support the management of the transition from local to regional control centres and transfers arrangements for control staff as far as is reasonably practicable.
- To maintain the political accountability of the Board to constituent FRAs.
These priorities underpin all the work that will be progressesed in this plan. The Other Regional Working area contains more information on working together.